"God be merciful to us & bless us, & cause His face to shine upon us. That Your way may be known on earth, Your salvation among all nations. Let the peoples praise You, O God; Let all the peoples praise You. Oh, let the nations be glad & sing for joy!"

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Mike the Author

Friday, March 2, 2018

Dogma or Disarray?

A couple of perceptive quotations I was reminded of recently.

“It
is not true at all that dogma is “hopelessly
irrelevant” to the life and thought of the average
man. What is true is that ministers of the Christian religion often assert that
it is, present it for consideration as though it were, and, in fact, by their
faulty exposition of it make it so. The central dogma of the Incarnation is
that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ was
only man, then He
is entirely irrelevant to any thought
about God; if He is
only God, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It
is, in the strictest sense, necessary
to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the
Incarnation of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not
the faintest reason why he should believe at all. And in that case, it is
wholly irrelevant to chatter about “Christian
principles”” (Dorothy Sayers, Creed
or Chaos, “Christians Letters to a Post-Christian
World,” 34).

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“Like
the other heresies, Eutychianism
continues to contaminate the faith of contemporaries. The teaching, that after
the incarnation the human nature of Christ withers away or is absorbed into his
divinity, leads people to believe that our being spiritual like Christ means
that our human nature and its limitations are overcome. On the contrary, Christ
himself is depicted in scripture as having the kind of human nature that grows
weary, hungers, thirsts, is hurt by scourging, thorns, nails and the spear, and
dies.

The attraction of Eutychian
teaching, however, is ever present, and many believe that “truly spiritual”
persons will not be subject to sickness, but, if they are, they will invariably
be healed because of their exceptional spirituality…

Chalcedon’s
claim, that a fully divine nature and an undiminished human nature are united
in the one Christ, assures Christians that grace does not destroy nature in it
redemption” (C. FitzSimmons
Allison, “The Cruelty of Heresy,” 150-1).